CHENNAI: Canteen cook Arokiadoss (32) might not have had enough money to afford a decent funeral for his daughter, who died two days after being born, but he certainly had the heart to donate her two eyes. “My child was not meant to live with me, but I hope she will see the world through someone elses eyes,” he recounts tearfully. The child had seizures and high heart beat rate after birth on July 23, necessitating the use of an incubator. She passed away on the afternoon of July 25.
Two doctors from the Government Eye Hospital at Egmore harvested the eyes at KMC within four hours of her death and transported them back for transplant scheduled on the next day. But that couldn’t happen as “septicemia had set in”, sources confirmed. The child’s birth was about 10 days premature and caused a problem, recalls Arokiadoss. “We had come for a check up at KMC when we were told my wife was going into labour.” As their first child Vijay Lawrence (4) had been born through the Caesarean section, they rushed Demetria to the C-section ward. “But she delivered the child naturally before they got her on the table,” he adds. That was when they were told that the child had been affected in birth. After doctors told him that his child’s had little chances of survival, Arokidoss prayed for a miracle as he watched the incubator room. It never happened. Instead, two days later.
The child died and doctors asked them to take the body. “I had no money left to give her a decent burial,” says the father choking back tears. “Then someone asked me to call this person from the help centre who does free burials.” Little did he know this would lead to his child’s eye being donated. MS Sivakumar, who arranged to have the child buried at the Otteri burial ground, then
planted the grain in hishead. “It was then that it struck me that our daughter could do some good, despite leaving this world,” says Arokiadoss.
Demetria agreed and the team from the Egmore Eye Hospital was summoned.
Normally, the eyes of children under two years of age are not harvested, explains a senior eye surgeon, a fact that made the transplant
daring. “If not for anything else, for the sheer initiative of the parents, the doctors obliged us and tried their best,” Sivakumar said.
He hopes this incident will motivate people to donate their loved one’s eyes.